When we get down to watch a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film, we are not there for history lessons. We take it for granted that the filmmaker will have his creative liberty to turn and twist the story and express his own creative vision. But if this creative liberty goes all the way to inadequate research and carelessness, it is definitely not something that we expect from Bhanshali.
People on the internet are divided about whether ‘Heeramandi’ is a good show or not. But There is obviously no doubt that the director has shown no reverence to factual correctness in his passion project.
In a scene, Sonakshi Sinha’s character Fareedan is shown to be reading a newspaper. The newspaper is a total blunder to be coming from a perfectionist like SLB. The show is set in the 1940s and the news headlines in Urdu are straight from Corona times. There is one story: ‘Warangal Municipal Elections: TRS Distributes Tickets’. One on ‘The Launch of a Scheme to Distribute 50,000 Masks by Youth Congress’, makes it clear that it cannot be 40s. And the careless headline ‘Self Confidence Helps in Fight Against Corona: Minister for Panchayat Raj, E Dayakar Rao’s Advice to Patients’ is ridiculous.
Some other people have pointed out that the architecture of the show does not match 1940s Lahore architecture and the most prominent Shahi Qilla-Grand Mosque is not visible in any scene from the windows. There are grandeurous dresses and palaces, which were not very common in Heeramandi. But these things we can oversee.
What we cannot oversee are the factual inaccuracies and the very evident carelessnes. In a library there is a book by Peer-e-kamil, who did not write during that period. It looks like Bhanshali has jumbled up all his previous works into one giant spectacle and expects everyone to go crazy over it.